In this way the Interessenverbände performed some of the functions exercised by party organs elsewhere, but two closely related things distinguished them from parties. First, they chiefly sought to gain influence not over legislators who had votes in the Reichstag, but over government ministers and officials who held the real reins of power; personal connections and lobbying were the chief means. Second, because the decisions they sought to affect were not reached in a parliamentary way, they did not have to involve themselves in the kinds of trade-offs and compromises that parliamentary life involves. They constituted a kind of second public sphere, both separate from and partly intertwined with the one where parties and the organs of opinion connected with them fostered debate about issues of the day. Like parties, the Verbände appealed to theory and ideology in support of the interests they represented, but without any prospect that the clash of principles they staged could have an impact on the form of national political life. Together the two spheres of parties and interest groups embodied the special kind of relationship between state and society Bismarck desired, and in large part established, namely one in which, as Thomas Nipperdey puts it, “the parties were reduced to merely social formations, in order to free the state from the burden of their pressures and thus assure the state’s domination over society.”29 German politics did not provide an arena for resolving the struggle between “competing legitimacies” in the manner Maurice Agulhon describes for France; the Empire was constituted precisely so as to exclude the possibility that the independent interplay between various social forces could itself generate the regulating principles of their interaction, preventing any outcome that resembled the triumph of liberal republicanism in the Third Republic. Bismarck’s politics were in their way anti-teleocratic, especially by virtue of his willingness to sacrifice traditionally legitimate authority to Realpolitik, but the primacy of state over society he sought to guarantee did not allow for the emergence of a political realm with the capacity to regulate itself autonomously. Such state primacy was not itself new; it had long found expression in the attempts by German governments to constitute bürgerliche Gesellschaft as an object of governmental action and remake it on this basis. In the conditions of the end of the century, however, the preservation of this relationship, especially in its Prussian version, precluded Germany from drawing the educative benefits from political integration that Gambetta identified for France.
One way to see how this contrast operated is by taking note of a development characteristic of the new historical moment that took form from around 1850, the crystallization of the social formation called the lower middle class – in German the Kleinbürgertum, in France the petite bourgeoisie, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has described its emergence in Germany with particular clarity and in terms that are at least partially applicable elsewhere. Situating the “birth-hour of the German lower-middle class” in the two decades after 1850, Wehler makes evident how closely its emergence as a distinct category was tied up with other post-1850 phenomena to which we have given emphasis here. Until the mid century the Bürgertum of German cities had consisted of a hierarchically ordered array of groups, each enjoying a particular measure of the privileges that conveyed the status of citizens or recognized inhabitants. That some individuals or groups, such as particular guilds, enjoyed greater wealth or honor than others, and were thus “bigger” than their neighbors was evident, but all owed their position to membership in the local and graduated order of Stände. The importance that belonging to such an overarching local community bore is evident in the arrangements set up in various cities (the example of Basel has recently been highlighted) which restricted the right of citizens engaged in long-distance trade to sell goods from elsewhere on local markets (outsiders had no such right in any case), thus protecting the position of smaller artisans and retailers from competition by richer and more powerful fellow-townspeople.30 The power of local communities to define Bürger status was challenged by the notion of uniform Staatsbürgertum put forward by territorial states, but town life in general continued to revolve around the traditional order based on status differences. The opposition Mack Walker has examined between “hometown” loyalists and “movers and doers” already contained some of the later one, but such a distinction subordinated the contrast between different sorts of burghers to one between traditional ways of organizing town life and external threats to it.
After 1850, however, the simpler duality of “big” and “little” Bürger took on increasing salience, in response to three changes: the rapid industrialization encouraged by railroad construction, drawing a limited upper stratum of Wirtschaftsbürger into activities whose scale was increasingly out of proportion to those who remained chiefly involved in the local economy; the definitive abolition of guilds, ending the general association of economic life with a locally regulated order of privilege; and the replacement of the old and variegated forms of urban citizenship with a single definition of it provided by the newly unified state. It was in this context that the category of Kleinbürger emerged, replacing the differences that had once rested on people’s position inside a graded order of privilege with one that reflected a more abstract and quantitative distinction. In actuality the term Kleinbürgertum (with which Mittelstand was more or less synonymous) referred to a heterogeneous group with many inner divisions, but widely diffused within it (and encouraged by those who sought to appeal to or lead it) was a sense of nostalgia for an older, more locally oriented and morally regulated life that had once been more characteristic of burghers as a whole.31
One sign that the distinction between big and little bourgeois owed much to differing degrees of involvement in distant relations is the emphasis observers at the time and since have placed on the orientation of lower-middle-class people toward local life. Friedrich Engels saw the contrast in just these terms when he wrote that “the petit bourgeois represents local interests, the bourgeois universal ones.”32 Recent scholars such as Geoffrey Crossick and Hans-Gerhard Haupt agree: “In most cases, the petit-bourgeois way of life was an introspective and family centered one that concentrated on their immediate world of family and neighborhood. From this came their characteristic suspicion of the outside world and the unknown which turned them against both the bureaucratic state and the forces of banking and high finance.”33 Many small and medium-sized retailers were famously hostile to the department stores that developed during the second half of the century, a phenomenon to which Zola gave sustained attention in The Ladies’ Paradise. “The economic life of small enterprise remained bound within the perspective of the town itself, however much merchants tied them into wider economic relations,” a phenomenon amplified by the propensity of such people to put their savings into buying neighborhood property (rather than bonds or shares), often buildings in which artisans or workers lived. They were thus tied up “with place, personality, and family, in a fashion far less marked amongst the more substantial bourgeoisie … The material interests of property, credit and production were in this world bound up with moral and social relations that were often immediate and personal in character,” and as the orientation of more prosperous bourgeois shifted increasingly toward more distant involvements, “so the local and personal dimensions of the petite bourgeoisie became more distinctive.”34
This is not the only way in which the new conditions of the second half of the century gave new salience to the divide between upper and lower bourgeois, however. The post-1850 transformation also brought forth a different and more specifically modern kind of lower middle class, typically employed as civil servants or as administrators in large firms, and often referred to in Germany as a neue Mittelstand. An expanding lower civil service had been an important source of employment and a vehicle of social mobility for modest middle class families from early in the nineteenth century, but such opportunities expanded markedly after 1850. Private firms such as Siemens and public enterprises such as the Prussian state railway (by 1900, as we saw, the world’s largest single employ
er), both contributed to this development; the numbers of teachers, postal workers, accountants and secretaries, and administrators of insurance and welfare schemes expanded everywhere, doubling in France between 1850 and 1914 (where most were employed by the central government, in contrast to Britain, where local government employees made up a higher proportion of a similarly expanding total), while the proportion of blue-collar to white-collar workers in the overall German economy dropped from over 10 to 1 in 1872 to only 3.5 to 1 in 1912.35 In his pioneering social history of Friedrich Engels’s native city, Barmen, Wolfgang Köllman showed that the percentage of middle-level clerks in private and public employment in the city mushroomed from 2.5 percent to around 11 percent of the population between 1861 and 1907, while the percentage of small and medium-sized entrepreneurs and employers (below the level of large-scale manufacturers and merchants who constituted the narrow elite at the top of the urban pyramid, whose numbers remained stable) more than doubled.36 By the end of the century, in other words, there were two lower-middle classes, one the descendant of the earlier locally based order and one created by the expansion and thickening of public and private networks and the transformations it brought. There was, however, much coming and going between them, as many children of the first sought careers in the second, despite the aversion to large organizations and bureaucratic ways they or their relatives often voiced.
Like other sections of society the people who made up these groups were drawn into large-scale organizations and the forms of public life they helped to define. In Germany, as Geoff Eley pointed out some time ago, they joined a variety of different kinds of groups, including unions, professional, patriotic, and cultural associations. Some of these were explicitly political, on the left ones organized by socialists who sought to classify white-collar employees as workers and thus potential Party members, and on the right others associated with nationalist and agrarian interests whose anti-modernist and anti-socialist sentiments accorded with either the nostalgia for an earlier time or the sense of imperiled independence numbers of lower bourgeois felt. That both orientations were present is testimony to the falsity of the claim sometimes made that the category was uniformly rightist and anti-modernist, but this view of it does indicate one direction toward which some of its components could and sometimes did lean. Because this potential existed, the actual choices between democratically colored and authoritarian-tinged stances particular petits bourgeois or Kleinbürger made often depended on the kinds of connections between their immediate situations and national politics available to them, and these were broadly different in France and in Germany. When Gambetta based his strategy for establishing a stable democratic regime in France on a faith in the “republican future” of what he called the nouvelles couches sociales (strata that, as noted earlier consisted chiefly of lower bourgeois and peuple reshaped by the tighter integration of national life), a major support for his belief was an expectation that a parliamentary regime would provide an ongoing political education to citizens who had known only crisis politics before. Where parties could exercise real power, and defend the interests of their members and voters by way of the cooperation and compromise essential to parliamentary interchange, people whose ambivalence toward modern institutions opened them up to a variety of political appeals could learn to listen to ones that affirmed the value of constitutional self-government; where representative institutions were weak and interests sought protection outside them, people were more likely to be moved by demagogic invocations of some prior, often mythical order. In Germany, as Eley puts it, these choices were shaped “at the points of friction between the political parties and the pressure groups, the real mass organizations of Wilhelmine Germany,” and by the time of the War they were already issuing in the kinds of “strident denunciations of parliamentary forms” on which fascist orators would later expand. To be sure such denunciations were part of French politics too, but as Robert Paxton has recently argued, they came into a political system whose institutions and traditions had by then shown their ability to offer many modest people, rural and urban, both protection and some degree of participation; the failure of anti-parliamentary agitation there suggests that “fascist interlopers cannot easily break into a political system that is functioning tolerably well.” Much water would flow under many bridges before the situation these words describe would have to be confronted, but the political systems within which the challenges of the 1920s and 1930s would have to be met still bore many marks of the differing relations between state and society within which modern organized politics had emerged in France and Germany half a century before.37
Bourgeois politics: national weakness and local strength
In Germany, as elsewhere, the decades that saw the advent of both modern industry and nationally organized parties affected bourgeois in complex ways, bringing many Bürger large benefits in the economic realm, but presenting them with difficult challenges in politics. As in England, liberals in Germany experienced the end of the century as a period of crisis and decline, marked by the waning electoral fortunes of the liberal parties. The decline was not total: in terms of sheer numbers support for liberals of various stripes held up pretty well, keeping pace with the country’s rapid demographic growth. Between 1874 and 1912 the liberal vote tally grew by 53%, nearly matching the 58% expansion of the population. But the overall number of voters swelled by 135% in the same period, so that the percentage share of liberal supporters contracted sharply. One seemingly positive sign was the breadth of the liberals’ appeal: they were the only major political force to enjoy significant support in both urban and rural areas, as well as both large cities and small towns. The Social Democratic vote by contrast came almost wholly from big cities, mirroring in reverse the overwhelming concentration of conservative support in rural areas.38 Liberal breadth was not necessarily a sign of strength, however, especially in an age when the anxieties generated by rapid social change drew many people toward the organized interest groups who promised more focused strategies of engagement or defense. Electoral statistics suggest that the other face of liberalism’s diffuse appeal was unreliability: voters who favored liberals in some elections shifted to the conservatives or socialists in others, according to the issues at stake.39
Closely tied up with this weakness were the manifold divisions inside the broad middle classes that constituted liberalism’s chief base. In addition to the ambivalent relations between Bildungsbürger and Wirtschaftsbürger, there were splits between large and small bourgeois, free-traders and protectionists, people attached to competing local interests, as well as the religious divide that made many middle-class Catholics see the liberals as enemies. As time went by some liberals who thought their weakness owed much to these uncertainties recommended that the party reconceive its mission in class terms, becoming explicitly the champion of the Bürgertum. The most famous of these was the great sociologist Max Weber, whose frustration with the weakness of his fellow liberals and Bürger led him to advocate that they mount a consistent campaign against their class enemies, the big Junker landowners (that Weber did not see the working class as a foe in the same way is an important point to which we will return). Such a course, he hoped, would both cement middle-class unity and weaken the conservative alliance of tariff-prone industrialists and agrarians that helped the government to resist reforms. Weber’s proposal had something of the harsh spirit of Realpolitik operative in various reaches of German politics, and it made a certain sense, not only in the Marxist perspective on which it was partly modeled, but also because liberalism had become more bourgeois under the Empire, as the leftward shift of workers and the rightward turn of both peasants and some sections of the Kleinbürgertum left the liberals with a higher proportion of upper-middle-class followers. But such a strategy, however hard-headed Weber believed it to be, appeared as unrealistic to other liberals. As one prominent Party figure, Arthur Hobrecht, remarked:
We are not the representatives of a class or a stratum; it is ju
st an oratorical expression, which is perhaps sometimes useful, that we are the true representatives of the educated Mittelstand – I myself have never been able to think anything like that. The so-called middle classes are too indefinite and diverse a substance on which to build a firm foundation, and the German Bürgertum is too German to be especially unified or concise.
Ernst Basserman had a similar view, seeing the liberals’ base as too varied and socially indefinite for the Party “to take the lead in any class-based movement.”40 This ambivalent attitude toward class politics gave German liberals a certain common ground with their English counterparts, but the Germans could not appeal to the trinity of “liberty, Parliament, and progress” that gave Gladstone’s party an aura of operating above mere interest. On the contrary, the German situation we have outlined was one in which pursuing “interest” sometimes seemed preferable to operating in the untrustworthy realm of party politics.
Modernity and Bourgeois Life Page 33